“Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio” is an unusual title for an unusual musical experience.
On the surface, the oratorio — beautifully performed Friday night by the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony Chorus and baritone Daniel Belcher — is an absorbing statement on our time of war and its ravaging effect on the human psyche. At its core, however, composer Mark Grey and Navajo librettist Laura Tohe relay a communal journey of salvation and spiritual restoration.
Before a full house at Boulder’s Chautauqua Auditorium, conductor Michael Christie masterfully navigated the work’s progression through the four cardinal directions — East (birth), South (youth), West (adulthood) and North (death).
Belcher shone in his role and delivery of the protagonist, “Seeker,” representing a universal soldier who achieves inner peace by silencing the demons within.
Vocally powerful and intuitive, Belcher’s persuasive dramatization of the score further enhanced its ultimately triumphant message of healing and hope.
The fine festival orchestra fully realized the work’s robust — often explosive — instrumentation, even as the chorus carefully shaped its muted phrasings with precise diction and a fitting sensibility.
However, besides Tohe’s roughly hewn English-Navajo text, the most significant distraction to Grey’s overall thoughtful creation was an amateurish slide show of landscape photography by Deborah O’Grady. Projected center stage, above the chorus, the photos generally lacked style and substance, and — except for the closing sequence of an airborne dove — they bore little or no correlation to the flow and content of the score and libretto.
A slow pan of a single Navajo petroglyph or sacred site might have been more effective; or perhaps a single, center screen displaying the libretto only — replacing the two smaller screens on either side of the stage — would have more fully conveyed the impact of the music and prose.
On the whole, however, the 70-minute oratorio — structured in six movements sans intermission — is an entirely appropriate, stand alone work for a summer festival.
While its contemporary setting resonates today, it remains to be seen whether it will endure the test of time.
